Jeff - at around 55 seconds into the second of the most recently published videos (25_Panorama-PS-CS6) you make the statement that using CS5 with Lightroom 4 you don't get the ability to do photomerge. However, the pano merge you demo in the rest of the video seems to work in exactly the same way for a 7-shot pano of mine in my copy of CS5. I would appreciate clarification of what you mean here, as I am not sure (as an amateur) whether or not I need CS6 and the merging capabilities are important to me.

LR4 can use Photoshop CS5 for photomerge but you'll have to have LR4 render the files. With CS6 the files will be rendered using Camera Raw 7. Not a huge practical difference. I misspoke about HAVING to have CS6.

if you use CS5, does it mean that you lose the ability to work with smart pobjects in CS ? I mean, as far as I understand, when clicking on a smart object, you will be lead back to ACR, which means that the file will be rerendered by ACR.

You can take an image in LR4 and open it as a SO in CS5, but you better have the ACR 6.7 RC installed if you are using PV 2012 in LR4. Also note that ACR 6.7 can RENDER PV 2012 but you can't make any changes to the adjustments in ACR 6.7. That will take ACR 7.x in CS6. That makes using LR4 and ACR 6.7 less useful...

You can take an image in LR4 and open it as a SO in CS5, but you better have the ACR 6.7 RC installed if you are using PV 2012 in LR4. Also note that ACR 6.7 can RENDER PV 2012 but you can't make any changes to the adjustments in ACR 6.7. That will take ACR 7.x in CS6. That makes using LR4 and ACR 6.7 less useful...

Hi Jeff,

thanks for your fast answer !

But, if I understand you right, it makes no sense to use Lr4 -> ACR 6.7 to render SO becasue the sense of a SO is ( to my mind) that the raw is included and can be changed any time with ACR.

What I don't understand neither is that Adobe deosn't offers a way back for the SO -> raw to Lr. This could help.

...What do you mean? A Smart Object using a raw file embeds a copy of the raw file into the PSD/TIFF. The original raw file is left untouched in LR. That's as designed...

Yes, your absolutely right, but it could be something like the untouched raw-file and an xmp contianing ther chages. Surely I don't talk about an phys. xmp-file, but about the principle. It could be a named pipe which is used to communicate and tell the chages done to PS. I bet the "communication" between ACR and PS is done the same - or at least at a similiar way.

Once you create a SO there's really no easy way to have any changes made in the SO show up back in LR. The whole design and concept of SO's is based on a Photoshop centric workflow. If you save the SO from Photoshop you can load that image back into LR but it's a new file and considered a rendered image file, not raw. It's really a one way street...

Yeh, what I understand is that it could be possible a problem for Lr to seperate between changes it should be render in Lr and chages which belong to the SO ( or many of them) for PS. Especially, I think the space available for storing these things directly into DNG is limited.